This paper investigates the potential reasons for the surprisingly different labor market performance of the United States, Canada, Germany, and several other OECD countries during and after the Great Recession of 2008-09. Unemployment rates did not change substantially in Germany, increased and...

Detailed administrative data from a large and diverse community college are used to examine if academic performance depends on whether students are the same race or ethnicity as their instructors. To identify racial interactions and address many threats to internal validity we estimate models...

The paper reviews recent developments in the literature on wage inequality, with a particular focus on why inequality growth has been particularly concentrated in the top end of the wage distribution over the last 15 years. Several possible institutional and demand-side explanations are...

We document that an increasing fraction of jobs in the U.S. labor market explicitly pay workers for their performance using bonuses, commissions, or piece-rates. We find that compensation in performance-pay jobs is more closely tied to both observed (by the econometrician) and unobserved...

We examine the changing relationship between unionization and wage inequality in Canada and the United States. Our study is motivated by profound recent changes in the composition of the unionized workforce. Historically, union jobs were concentrated among low-skilled men in private sector...

This paper provides an introduction and quot;user guidequot; to Regression Discontinuity (RD) designs for empirical researchers. It presents the basic theory behind the research design, details when RD is likely to be valid or invalid given economic incentives, explains why it is considered a...

This paper compares the labor market implications of the health insurance system in Spain and in the United States. While most health insurance is privately provided to workers (by employers) in the United States, Spanish workers obtain health insurance coverage from the public social security...

This paper looks at the evolution of incomes at the top of the distribution in Canada. Master files of the Canadian Census are used to study the composition of top income earners between 1981 and 2011. Our main finding is that, as in the United States, executives and individuals working in the...

This paper compares trends in male and female hourly wage inequality in the United Kingdom and the United States between 1979 and 1998. Our main finding is that the extent and pattern of wage inequality became increasingly similar in the two countries during this period. We attribute this...

Over most of the 20th century successive generations of U.S. children had higher enrollment rates and rising levels of completed education. This trend reversed with the baby boom cohorts who attended school in the 1970s, and only resumed in the mid-1980s. Even today, the college entry rate of...